So, I’ve already failed at the whole…..writing every week thing. My apologies. I shall henceforth attempt to stick to the plan by writing sticky notes, putting reminders on a to-do list, set alarms on my phone, and whatever else that will help me keep to my promise.
I don’t really have anything meaningful to write about, but I do have a slightly amusing story (well, it was definitely NOT amusing at the time, but it’s one of those times in your life that you look back on and just have to laugh).
So one uneventful night, one of my housemates and I came back from a meeting and enter through our back door like we always do. I continue down the hallway towards my room, when all of a sudden I hear a shriek from the kitchen.
“Oh my gosh, there’s a mouse on our counter!”
To which I screamed like a girl.
Now let me preface this story by explaining my prior experience with rodents. When I was a little girl, we lived in the Bronx in an old apartment building. The radiators were built into the wall, and there happened to be holes going into the wall on both sides of the radiators. Well, as you may guess, we had a mouse problem. So my parents had to place mouse traps all around our house, fill up the holes with steel wool, and then pray to God that the little boogers wouldn’t find their way into our home. Thankfully we never did have many run-ins with them, although I would hear on occasion some scurrying behind our walls, which creeped me out enough to wind up hating the things.
So as you can imagine, I was not pleased at all to hear we had a mouse in our house. My other housemate by this time had walked into the kitchen as well and went over to the counter to check it out.
It wasn’t a mouse.
No. No, it was even worse.
It was a baby rat.
Once this was discovered, I quickly made a barricade out of glass doors, barring the kitchen from the hallway, where I stood behind the rest of the evening. My one housemate called a male friend over, who stood by our stove with a BB gun, as we had found the hole the rat had come from, which happened to be behind our cabinets toward the left of our oven.
Unfortunately the gun was to no avail, and we had to wait until the next morning to call pest control. Once he came over, all he did was put some rat poisoning underneath our house and give us some sticky paper to place on the floor where our stove was. So helpful.
Well, we go along our normal routines the rest of the week and didn’t catch sight of our little visitor again. However, we did notice a foul odor that began to permeate our kitchen. Try as we did, we could not get rid of the smell and decided to wait until the weekend to do a deep cleaning.
The rat's nest. I cannot explain to you how horrifying this discovery was
Saturday rolled around, and one of my housemates and I took on the task of purging our kitchen of everyspot of grime, filth, feces, putrescence, etc. We almost threw up, as we had found the rat’s nest, which was underneath our stove, where the drawer for pots and pans was. We cleaned the floor where the stove rested on and made it look brand new, cleaned out the stove, wiped down the counters, mopped the floors, washed the dishes, and everything else you can imagine.
But there was still the smell.
I could not understand for the life of me WHY our kitchen still smelled of a nameless stench, as we had just cleaned every possible inch of the area. Well, we take hold of our stove and begin to move it back, when I leaned over towards the back of it, and……
There it was.
It seemed as though a cloud of death covered my face, and I withdrew from the area immediately, fearing the worst. There’s either a really old piece of food in the wiring, or there’s a dead animal.
I didn’t want to freak out my housemate right away, so I calmly said, “I think we should unscrew the back of our stove, just so we can find out what exactly this smell is.” So we unscrewed all 15 or 20 bolts that were holding the back top of our stove, pulled it apart, and then….
She screamed. My housemate screamed bloody murder.
And that’s when I knew my deepest fears were confirmed.
Mommy and Daddy rat's grave (They are the two gray areas - literally- on either side)
Yep, you guessed it. We had a dead rat in the back of our stove. But that’s not all. Not only did we have ONE dead rat, we had TWO. Yep, Mommy and Daddy Rat were resting in peace on both sides of the back of our stove.
Needless to say, we got the stove from hell out of our house, and a brand new, shiny, rat-free one in it’s place. Plus a bottle of chardonnay from our landlady because she felt so bad and wanted to provide us with some “liquid sustenance”.
Moral of the story: There’s never any situation that can’t be cured with some wine.
And follow your nose. It never lies to you.
